2019 October News Day 272

Hi Friends!

Before sharing personal news, I’ll give various bits of news about Youversion Bible reading plans and Bible podcasts.

If you haven’t noticed, I believe it is a good thing to read the Bible. Following the suggestion of one of my spiritual fathers, I think it is a great idea to read the Bible once a year. Devoted Bible believers are kind of divided between the ones who choose to memorize a whole lot of the Bible, and those who choose to read the Bible in a year. Here’s what I have noticed about the Bible memorizers: In order to keep 300 or more verses in your memory, one needs to be dedicated to reviewing the chosen verses regularly. And Bible memorizers will not want to change translations, because it will mess with what they have memorized. So while Bible memorizers can amaze their friends by quoting appropriate passages verbatim from memory, they may miss the blessing of yearly reading some Old Testament books or gaining insight from different translations. Obviously (from my biased description above) you will know that I prefer the decision I made early in life to read the Bible every year instead of focussing on memorization. I enjoy keeping my Bible reading fresh by using different translations, and embracing the whole book— cover to cover— in my Bible study, rather than pinpointing 300 verses. This means I never get to amaze people by quoting passages verbatim, but I can usually paraphrase the passages I need in conversation. 

All that was to say that I encourage you to keep things fresh! At dailybiblereading.info you can find tips for

• reading the Bible in a real-book Bible,
• listening to podcasts of the NLT and GNT,
• or you can mix listening and reading using multiple translations and hearing multiple voices using the Read To Me Daily YouVersion reading plan.
• Tips on how to do that with various apps or web sites are also found at dailybiblereading.info.

What I do NOT recommend is that you spend multiple years in a row listening to me reading. If you are listening to something I have produced this year, do something new and challenging in 2020. If you liked this year following my reading plan, please share my website with your friends.

If you happen to be using the Read To Me Daily YouVersion reading plan this year, I have just updated the images for each day. If you happen to be using a tablet, you may have noticed that the daily theme images (with words like Eyes on Christ or Wisdom) were pixelated and ugly. Now they should look much sharper. Semesters 3-4 have been published with the new images, and semesters 1-2 should go live with new pictures next week. You won’t see the new pictures if you just stay logged in on your device. Log out and then log back into your YouVersion app via the main settings page, then your plan should update to the new version.

Hey, let’s share our Bible-reading insights together. These don’t have to be profound. I have two ways to suggest: Come the first of the year, I will share my YouVersion Bible reading plan with people who request to join in my group. I’ll start on December 31st, so my sharing will be visible to you if you start on January 1st. If things go like this year, I normally share a little something about once a week. 

But secondly, I have been copying most of my posts from YouVersion into posts at our new forum: BibleReaders.info. The BibleReaders forum is open to any Bible reader sharing about any verse in the Bible on any day. And it is a good place to ask questions. So no matter where you are in your Bible Reading experience, you can share. Let me give an example: Someone might share, “Hey, praise the Lord, this is the first time I have made it through reading Matthew!” You know what? That would encourage me greatly! Right now it’s kind of sleepy in the forum, and I hope things pick up in the new year.

Gale will be going to Jakarta with me starting on October 3! She comes home on the 21st, and I stay on for another month. We look forward to a little more than two weeks of special time with Hannah and Brandon, and Ava (10), Joel (9), and Devin (3). 

We praise the Lord for Him providing a 5 times bigger office for our little Bible translation organization, right in the same building where we have been located. We don't even have to change our address! Praise the Lord for our new office. 

While in Jakarta, I will have some important days of meetings with our five Albata employees there. It just so happened that right when we moved into our better office, some difficulties regarding employees surfaced. I have struggled to know how to share this prayer request. I hope I have said enough for you to read between the lines when I say that I will need to make some hard decisions. Please ask for heavenly wisdom for me, as I so much want to make upright decisions.

Please pray that our new part-time employee (Bobby) will be able to do a great job promoting the use of our TSI New Testament through social media, our website, and YouVersion reading plans. The goal of this is not our fame, but to increase the understanding of God's Word in every province of Indonesia.

It is a huge answer to prayer that in November and December three consultants will come, for the pre-publication checking of several Old Testament books. The venue for this has been very difficult to set up. We had to move locations from Papua, where there are protest riots now. The checking will now take place in Salatiga, Central Java. Praise the Lord that a faithful donor has promised to give the full $5000 budget for the two months of consultant checking. Please pray that through these face-to-face checking times, we will build trust with our consultants so that checking can be done via email in the future. Please pray that we can complete all consultant checking of Genesis and Ecclesiates by the end of December.

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The Scrub Team; The June Christmas Tree; Things One Wants To Know

These were published in 1919 by William E. Barton.

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Why the Byzantine Greek New Testament is the best

The purpose of this podcast is to announce my short paper telling why I support the Byzantine Greek Text (BT) as the most accurate representation of what the apostles wrote. This has been a major decision for me, because it means that my translation team and I will revise our published Indonesian New Testament by they year 2022.

Here’s the link.

You will not be able to see the footnotes in this text, so I have attached a PDF file as Bonus Content for this podcast. In order to see it, you will probably need to visit dailybiblereading.info and find this episode.

I was not interested, and not even open, to considering the Byzantine Greek text over the ET (Eclectic Text//United Bible Societies Text/Nestle-Aland Text) until I went to meet Dr. Timothy Friberg, who also has worked in Indonesia for as long as I have. Dr. Friberg is the genius who compiled the Analytical Greek New Testament (AGNT), first published in 1985. The AGNT provides more helpful and accurate grammatical parsing of the NT Greek text because it is based on careful linguistic analysis, rather than the traditional Latin-derived parsing. It is therefore used by a majority of trained Bible translators and many others. When Friberg talks about anything having to do with Greek grammar, then people really should listen. He is the one who convinced me about the Byzantine Greek text being the best one, and the best one for us to translate for all audiences.

But especially for someone working in Indonesia, it is so much better to use the Byzantine Text. Here’s why: Muslims believe that their Al-Koran has been unchanged through the centuries, and that the Christian Bible (particularly the New Testament) has been fiddled with.  Their belief in the immutability of the Al-Koran is actually incorrect, but they have ample proof that the NT has been fiddled with, because they can point to words taken out of our Bibles in the last 120 years.

In contrast, the BT has been stable through the centuries. It includes most of the words that readers familiar with the KJV miss in modern translations, and it can be translated without the need of any footnotes talking about textual variants.

I have written a short article (linked here in the episode notes) that outlines how the shift happened to translating the ET rather than a better Greek text. I hope that some of my listeners will be interested in that story. Here are a few teaser facts:

• About 120 years ago, Christians were told that earlier manuscripts penned on papyrus and preserved in the dry climate of Egypt (especially around the library center in Alexandria) more likely revealed the authentic form of the words penned by the apostles. Subsequent manuscript finds and analysis over the next century did NOT support the claims that manuscripts of the Alexandrian type form a stream that consistently points to the most authentic text of the NT. What research showed is that Alexandrian manuscripts show sloppy and wild variations because Egyptian copyists freely redacted the texts they copied.
• Wescott and Hort published their Greek NT in 1881. It was based on only two Alexandrian texts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Successive editions were published by Eberhard Nestle (beginning in 1898), who was followed by his son, then Kurt Aland (in the 1950s). All these editions prioritized Alexandrian manuscripts. These editions are known by various names, and I will refer to them as the Eclectic Text. Even though many textual discoveries were documented in successive editions, those discoveries were largely relegated to abstruce footnotes, and the main text still very much followed what Wescott and Hort published. The Christian public was not made aware about the wild variations discovered in Alexandrian manuscripts.
• It has been conclusively shown that Alexandrian copyists shortened the texts they copied. They did the same thing with Homer’s poems.
• Sometimes more than one variant are found in one or two verses of the Greek text. I was further convinced about the flawed nature of the ET when I found out that it displays 105 verses where the combinations of variants chosen are not represented in any extant manuscript. Or if we widen that to two consecutive verses in the ET, we find a further 210 two-verse combinations that are not found in any extant manuscript. An example in a single verse occurs in John 5:2 where no manuscript has been found anywhere that contains the name spelled ‘Bethzatha’ and the exact form of the Greek translated as ‘at the sheep gate’. To me, the presence of 315 unsupported combinations represents a fatal flaw in the principles used in compiling the ET.
• By contrast, the Byzantine Text has stayed stable throughout the centuries. Byzantine manuscripts predominately were found in the wide area which received the original letters written by the apostles, places like Antioch, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, etc. 95% of the manuscripts containing NT books or fragments or them are of the BT type. This is why the BT is also called the Majority Text. It seems that a majority of ancient copyists believed that this was the text to pass on to following generations, and Alexandrian renderings died out.
• Some of you will have heard about the Textus Receptus, which is the 1516 Greek text compiled by Erasmus that became the basis of the KJV NT. In my article I show briefly why the BT is far superior to the Textus Receptus.
• Just as succeeding editions of the ET basically played ‘follow the leader’ since Wescott and Hort’s 1881 publication, so modern translations have played ‘follow the leader’ since the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901. Translations that followed ASV’s lead include RSV, NASB, GNT, NIV, CEV, NLT, NET, and ESV. The prefaces of all these translations claim that the translators were following the ET, but in reality all of these only followed it around 72% of the time. In doing this, it is clear that the translators took the lazy and safe path, rather than themselves examining the textual evidence. There is no evidence that the ASV translators were super-scholars who made consistently excellent decisions about the Greek text. They (or some of them) played it safe and went with KJV-like readings in some places, but then seemingly by whim they (or others of them) went with poorly-supported textual variants in other places that were sure to anger readers— like leaving out words from the Lord’s Prayer. One after another, succeeding generations of translators of newer translations have simply following the lead of the previous popular translations, all the while keeping up an appearance of scholarship by including misleading footnotes that say, “Some manuscripts add the words …” By not following the their declared Greek text consistently, all the translators of the above listed Bibles have shown that they really did not respect the ET to be faithfully showing the content of the original autographs. If Bible translators don’t follow the ET faithfully, then what justification can be found to claim that it is the best available representation of what the apostles wrote? What Greek text will we, the Christian public, choose to follow? It doesn’t make sense to create a new edition of the Greek text based on what translators have actually translated since 1901!
• The assertions above are supported by hard evidence in my January 2019 article: Playing ‘Follow the Leader’ in Bible Translation.

The Eclectic Text is basically dead. One might compare it to the theory of evolution. Experts from multiple scientific disciplines have repeatedly announced that evolution can no longer be maintained as a viable theory. (And many of the scientists are scratching their heads as to how to replace it, because they absolutely will not entertain returning to believing in the creation of the world.) In a similar way, seminary professors who have long taught the superiority of earlier Alexandrian manuscripts are not even open to looking at articles that might change their view. Someone has observed that just when a popular theory or philosophy has lost logical credibility, that is just when people become more bone headed about it. I hate to say it, but support for the BT will need to come from ordinary conservative Christians who care about God’s Word and His reputation, and who are willing to look at the evidence.

• In my article, I discuss English translations of the BT. The most available literal translation of the BT is the World English Bible, and I prefer the British Edition.
• Unfortunately, I find that there is no translation of the BT done in a more meaning-based manner. There is no BT-based version like the NIV or the NLT. My firm belief is that every believer should have access to at least one good literal translation and one good meaning-based translation. When a literal translation leaves the reader wondering if their understanding of a verse is correct, they need to be able to open a meaning-based translation to find their answer. ALL the false cults that have ever sprung up from the year 1600 to the present based their teaching on literal translations where the meaning of their favorite passages was hard to understand and open to multiple interpretations. My particular desire is to allow for meaningful audio recordings of a New Testament translated from the BT. Literal translations from ancient Greek cannot ever express things in a natural and easy-to-understand way in modern English. The two languages are too different. As someone who has made two complete recordings of the whole Bible, I refuse to record a verse in a translation where I know that the listener who is not following the written text will misunderstand it. That’s why my podcast notes give little tweaks I have made to even the GNT and NLT.

If there is a group out there currently trying to make a good readable, meaning-based translation of the BT, I want to join them. If no group or organization has started to do this, then I will start and I call on interested parties to join me. So starting next year, I want to make a series of podcasts reading the results. I hope that this modest beginning will lead to more faithful Bible translations for the Christian public in the future.

• Please pray for this effort.

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Which Greek text of the New Testament is best?

The text for this blog post needs better formatting than I can make here. Please click this link to view the PDF file.

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Digging Deeper Daily News May-June 2019

Greetings Friends!

Thanks for listening or reading this news update, which is for everyone reading the Bible— but especially to all who are following the Digging Deeper Daily reading plan. As always, you can find all sorts of information about this reading plan at dailybiblereading.info. That’s where to look for helpful tips to make it easy listen or read the Bible in a year. In particular, see the Read This First information linked in the site header.

I praise God that the 3rd semester of the Read To Me Daily reading plan is live now in your YouVersion Bible reading app. The link for subscribing is in the episode notes. If you don’t know, this reading plan follows the Digging Deeper Daily reading plan (like my podcasts) but this is an audio plan within YouVersion. In the third semester, I read the devotional page, then the internally bundled YouVersion recordings are played for the Bible readings. Please pray for me in preparing the 4th semester, so that it will be published before people complete the 3rd semester.

I haven't been posting the videos from TheBibleProject.com like I planned in email updates and at our Facebook group. But I do at least want to remind you of them. The overview videos for each Bible book that they have done are Way Better than my short comments in the podcasts. They are especially helpful for more difficult books of the Bible, like the Old Testament prophetic books.

Right after this news podcast goes live, I will do another podcast on What Greek text of the New Testament that I recommend. That is the Byzantine text. In my opinion, the Nestle-Aland text no longer holds up under academic scrutiny as the best text for Bible translation or serious Bible study. In my podcast notes, I will link to readable articles that support what I am saying. For me as a Bible translator, this is not a decision I have made lightly. This will mean a lot of work for me and my team in Indonesia, because we will  revise our published New Testament to match the Byzantine text by 2022. Some have asked and will ask if I will redo all my daily Bible reading podcasts. I’m sorry, I certainly won’t have time for that. But here’s what I want to do, LORD willing: I would like to make a new series of podcasts of the New Testament that will be based on a new translation of the best Greek text. These won’t be daily podcasts, and I can’t do this alone. I need some volunteers who have time to help me. If you can use online Bible study tools effectively, and think you might have a flair for expressing Bible concepts in everyday language, please use the contact link at dailybiblereading.info to email me.

Here is the MOST IMPORTANT thing I want to share with you in this News update: I want to highly recommend that EVERYONE who will read this letter or listen to this podcast to see the documentary movie called American Gospel. If you don’t want to spring immediately for the two hour movie (which is well worth the $5 price), please view the free one hour video linked here. This is a very clear presentation of the TRUTH about the false gospel that is being taught in so many churches in America. Even if you feel that your church is teaching what the Bible teaches, I still urge you to see the one hour version of American Gospel. I think every Christian needs to be able to identify the false message, because someone you know is listening to it, and you will want to be able to help them. If you live in another country, I also urge you view to this video, because this false gospel has been exported all around the globe. Let me also share another little tidbit on this topic, showing Francis Chan’s perspective.

In family news, I am thrilled that my grandson Luke (16) will be going with me for 18 days to Papua, Indonesia, starting on the 22nd of June. Four college age people in an internship program with Pioneer Bible Translators will meet us there, and I will take them for a five-day adventure living in an Orya village. The goal of this time is to find out what village life in a tropical rainforest is like. They will help catch, butcher, harvest, and prepare the food we eat. I hope that they leave feeling like they have truly made a few good friends among the Orya people. And I know that whenever I go out there, the people will ask me about Luke and the four interns. Please pray in the first week of July! We hope that this experience will prepare all five of them for whatever service God has in mind for them in the future.

Lord bless you all. We send our love in Christ to you.

Phil & Gale

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January Digging Deeper NEWS

Hey, greetings to ninty-two friends who have signed up for this letter!

If you haven't signed up for our email Digging Deeper newsletters, here's the link to do so.

Thank you for responding to my invitation to join this letter list. If you are listening to the podcast covering the information below and you did not receive an email from me by now, that means that you haven’t signed up. Please visit dailybiblereading.info and follow the link at the top of the site to join our list.

The idea to have a special list for newsletters should have come to me sooner. I finally decided to add this list because it has been so clear that my news update podcasts plus my posts at the Facebook group have not been reaching very many people. You who have signed up for this list will get a maximum of 12 emails in 2019, and then no more. I will start a new list for 2020, and this list will be deleted.

For those listening to the audio Devotionals in this first semester of the Read To Me Daily reading plan, beginning next semester the devotionals will be read by Ashlee Smith. Ashlee is a member of the same church our family attends in Siloam Springs. For those who have listened to the Daily Bible Reading Podcasts her voice will be somewhat familiar, as she recorded a lot of the women’s parts when those podcasts were made.

Here are The Bible Project videos that will enrich your understanding of the books we’ll be reading.

22 January	Job	summary	wisdom series
27 Jan	1st Peter	summary
31 Jan	Exodus	1-18  19-40	Torah Series
1 February	James	summary
7 February	2Peter	summary
9 February	Luke	summary	Luke-Acts Series
11 February	Psalms	summary
21 February	Leviticus	summary	Torah Series

 

Now I have something rather unusual and surprising to share: Having been in the field of Bible translation for 39 years, I didn’t think that I would change my opinion about the best Greek text to follow in translating the New Testament. But less than a year ago, the Lord arranged for me to meet a world-class expert in Biblical Greek, and he got me interested in this topic. Before meeting him, I confess that I would not have been motivated to click on any link leading to an article about different Greek texts. I was happy with remaining ignorant about the topic. My opinion now is that the Byzantine text (also called the Majority Text) is the most authoritative New Testament Greek text. And I urge every Bible reader to NOT just remain ignorant about what this means.

I have brought this up because I ask for your help in sharing a 12-page article that I have written. If you can help me share it with pastors or anyone else you think would be interested, we have a chance of halting a senseless game of ‘follow the leader’ that has been played in the field of Bible translation for the last 120 years. My article has quite a few supporting links to other articles written by people more knowledgeable than I am about this topic.

Look, I know this is an advanced subject, and many of you are going to say, “This is all Greek to me,” but here’s the point: Most of us are using Bibles that really ought to be considered defective. My own Bible translation work turns out to also be defective, because for 38 years I made translations of the Eclectic Greek text (also called the Nestle-Aland/UBS text). Nearly all Bible translators made the same mistake because we were unaware that suppositions (or opinions of experts) about ancient Greek manuscripts were speculative and wrong. (This should not surprise us! Just think of the conflicting claims of nutritional experts about what are healthy and not-healthy foods!) The defective Bibles I mean include the NIV, NLT, GNT, ESV, NET, and so many others.

My friend Doug Pack (who frequently posts in the Digging Deeper Facebook group) asked me recently how come I still am promoting reading the Bible in translations — like all those I just mentioned — if I believe they are based on a defective Greek text. My answer is that it will take time for the decision-makers and Bible publishers to be open to hearing the truth. I hope all major Bible translations will be revised and released in new versions based on the Majority/Byzantine text. In the meantime, let’s not stop reading the Bibles we have! My article gives information about currently available English translations of the Byzantine Greek text.

If you will help me spread the word by reading my article or sharing the link, perhaps we can hasten the day when new editions of the Bibles mentioned above will follow the best Greek text. Please share my article with people who are dedicated students of God’s Word. You don’t have to be able to read Greek to understand my article.

 

On to a new topic! If you are following the Read To Me Daily YouVersion reading plan and using the audio, you have probably noticed a little bug. I don’t know if this bug shows up for Apple devices. For Android devices it definitely is noticeable. The automatic audio playing of the different Bible portions will sometimes skip back to re-play the Devotional page’s audio, rather than continuing on to the next Bible reading. The YouVersion people have been informed and I am told they are working on this.

Then something I am sure is happening for all platforms is this: If you are playing the audio of Read To Me Daily plan or any other, and if the next portion is only a partial chapter, then the recorded citation of the book name and chapter is not played. When the YouVersion app automatically progresses to the next portion listed for the day, the reader only cites the book and chapter if that next chapter is a full chapter. Take for example day 22 of the RTMD plan. The audio reading of a chapter from Job was immediately followed by Mark 14:1, without even a pause between the two. For people who are not watching the screen, this can be VERY confusing! I have put in a request that this be fixed, perhaps using an automated voice give the citation for partial chapter readings. I think we’ll have to live with this defect for some time.

 

As some of you know, I still go to Indonesia twice per year, and each of my visits there lasts for 7 weeks. My next trip starts on February 5. I would really appreciate your prayers for Gale and myself. This time, Gale will visit her aunt who lives in NY State, and she normally would not pick to go there in February. But her aunt is turning 100, so she is going to help celebrate this milestone. Her aunt is still ‘with it’ mentally and will definitely enjoy Gale being there. I personally thank the Lord for such good communication options as we have nowadays. Gale and I talk with each other every day.

An important activity is happening for our team on this trip to Indonesia. From February 11th through the 28th, a consultant will be helping us with the final pre-publication check of Genesis 5-25 and the book of Esther. Three of our team members will be coming from three different provinces. The consultant herself will be coming from India. There will also be some reasonable costs that need to be paid for some local people who will help us in answering the consultant’s questions. So perhaps now you can see why a full consultant check like this is so expensive! A lot of money will be spent to check just 30 chapters. Thankfully the event will have a lot of training value for our team members. Here are some prayer requests about this:

• Please pray that the Lord will help us with good health.
• Please pray the Holy Spirit will help the team of local people so that they will be able to answer the consultant’s questions thoughtfully and correctly.
• Checking like this always reveals some weak places in a translation. I have never seen any translation pass a consultant check with no changes. Please pray that weaknesses found in our translation will be fixed, resulting in a high-quality and very understandable translation.
• Please pray that the consultant will be so pleased with the integrity of our work that she will agree to do checking via email in the future, rather than face-to-face.
• Praise the Lord with us that He has already supplied the funds budgeted for this checking event.

Our translation team is being blessed and challenged daily by the participation of almost 20 active volunteers. These volunteers receive two chapters per day of our draft translation via a Whatsapp group. They respond with helpful suggestions and questions. I am hoping to build upon this and expand the number of active volunteers to 48. The input from these groups has been VERY valuable in checking Genesis and Exodus recently. We offer an online Basics of Bible Translation course online to further enhance the ability of the volunteers to help us. Here are our prayer requests about this:

• For the first time, In our current group-sharing of our draft of Exodus, we had some people leave the checking group. One person said, “Don’t add or take away from anything in God’s Word!” Uh, well, doing that is certainly not our intention! But there was no discussion that I could find within that group where anyone accused us of adding or subtracting anything from the text of Exodus. Please pray that we will learn how to more effectively manage these groups so that people remain happy to take part in them.
• Please pray for Jaya, our team member who manages all the groups, currently five groups and some people contributing suggestions via email.
• Please pray that our active volunteers will grow to 48 people from all over Indonesia.

I will still be in Indonesia through most of March, so I will send my next update letter from THERE and can tell more about what is happening.

May the Lord bless you Real Good! 

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Looking forward to the NEW YEAR

Hi Friend!

I want to spread the news that my new Read To Me Daily plan is now LIVE in the YouVersion app. If you haven’t heard, you can read this plan normally, OR if you hit the play button on the Devotional page, it becomes like a podcast, where you can listen to the whole thing, including the devotional introduction. This is perfect for those who would like to read and listen at the same time. However due to an unforeseen chain of circumstances, the audio devotional will not be in the app until sometime on January 2. The link to see or sign up for this plan is here in the episode notes: https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/13707/

I am grateful to the fine people at YouVersion for the extraordinarily patient help they gave to me to get this new kind of plan set up. They not only gave me excellent help by email, but even phoned me twice.

If you will be joining me in using the Read To Me Daily plan on January 1st, please be aware that the Devotional page will not have the play button for audio for the first 2-3 days. The play button should magically appear by January 3rd, and if it doesn’t, please look for another announcement from me like this one.

I ask for prayer as I am searching for a new voice to take my place in reading the devotionals for the Read To Me Daily plan. I hope to find a volunteer who is more expressive in reading than I am, and who has the time to edit recordings.

It is time for me to recommend different Bible podcasts for those ready to move to a different voice for next year. The two big alternatives are Daily Audio Bible (the oldest, and my inspiration for starting the DBRP in 2014) and Daily Radio Bible.

As some of you would have noticed, my devotional comments are usually talking about something that was previously read. This is a bit counter-intuitive to some. If you are one of those people, two YouVersion audio reading plan authors talk more about ‘this is what you will read’ style. They are Kris Langham who has an app and reading plan called Through the Word,

[Examples:

https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/437-ecclesiastes-bible-audio-guide
https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/387-luke-bible-audio-guide]

and Nikki Gumble, who has a plan called Bible in One Year.

I personally am planning to follow the Read To Me Daily plan using the NIV in 2019. Since the devotional text was not written with the NIV in mind, I am expecting to find times when the devotional comments will not match closely enough with the NIV. If you decide to join me in using the NIV with the Read To Me Daily plan, please remember that I would like to hear your comments. We might even do a plan sharing thing this year with people going through the NIV.

The NLT podcasts will again be re-released daily at dailybiblereading.info. And the GNT podcasts will be re-released daily at dailygntbiblereading.info.

Perhaps you--- like me, have been finishing up the final Bible readings for 2018. Just today I wondered about Isaiah’s dates. It turns out that the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple which Isaiah describes in the past tense in Isaiah 64 didn’t happen until 100 years after his death. As I have mentioned before, prophets frequently describe future events in the past tense. John does it all the time in Revelation. If you also are finishing Isaiah, you might be interested in viewing two videos about the book of Isaiah at https://thebibleproject.com/explore/isaiah/. In response to the first of the videos, if you have listened to what I said somewhere about Isaiah, you will know what I think about the authorship of Isaiah. I believe he wrote it all.

Please encourage your friends to read the Bible in 2019!

May the Lord bless you ‘real good’.

Phil

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